Unless you’re a Cardinals fan (or you just really hate the Braves) Game 5 of the 2019 NLDS was one of the dullest winner-take-all games in recent memory. The Cardinals dropped a 10-spot in the top of the first and entered the bottom of the frame with a 98 percent chance to win. The contest closely resembled a game of Monopoly where early on, one player gets a few lucky rolls and quickly scoops up the choicest properties, making their victory inevitable while their opponents just go through the motions for the next three hours.
If a game draws a comparison to Monopoly, things have gone horribly awry. On Board Game Geek, a website which aggregates and weights user reviews of board games, card games, and folk games, and ranks them, Monopoly holds a pitiful score of 4.299. Out of 18,746 ranked games, Monopoly comes in 18,738th. The only games that fare worse on the BGG list are games for small children, so Monopoly is the absolute worst way a group of adults could choose to spend a game night.
The runaway leader problem isn’t the only reason Monopoly is reviled, but it’s the most pertinent in looking at the design of baseball. It’s not fun to play a game that’s decided in the first few rounds even if you’re the player winning, and it’s not fun to watch a baseball game that’s over before one team gets to take their first swings. To the impartial observer, blowouts are as dull as they are rare, but baseball’s problem isn’t just with blowouts. In 2019, if a team took a lead into the second inning, they won 68.4 percent of the time. Since Charles Darrow ripped off Elizabeth Magie’s The Landlord’s Game and called it Monopoly, game designers have gotten better about reigning in players who jump out to early leads. Games with exponential power growth often include catch-up mechanics which give the trailing players an extra push to keep the competition taut.
Wolfgang Wärsch’s The Quacks of Quedlinburg is especially good in this area. In Quacks, players compete to brew the best potions, and potions are brewed by drawing ingredient tokens out of a bag. Some ingredients are beneficial while others make the potion explode if too many of them are drawn. Each round, players are given an amount of currency based on the quality of their potion, so better potions lead to better ingredients which lead to better potions and so on.
A player’s “deck” of ingredients snowballs, so trailing players are given a head start every round in the form or rat tails, free ingredients that are added to that player’s pot, and event cards which occasionally benefit the player with the fewest points. Without catch-up mechanics, each game of Quacks would be decided in the first few rounds. Whoever got out to the best start would become unstoppable, and like Game 5 of the NLDS, the game would become boring rather quickly.
Baseball, of course, doesn’t have catch-up mechanics on a game level. It has the opposite: the mercy rule. In Little Leagues, the game will end if one team has a lead of X by a certain inning, and in all levels of baseball, the home team doesn’t take their at-bats if they have a lead going into the bottom of the last inning.
On a macro level, catch-up mechanics do exist in baseball. Small market teams benefit from revenue sharing. The aim of this to ensure that small market teams don’t lag behind big market teams on the field, but it’s not always clear that teams are using this money to better their on-field performance. In the last two years, the MLBPA has filed grievances against the A’s, Rays, Marlins, and the Pirates (twice) for not using this money to better their teams.
Revenue isn’t the only form of catch-up mechanics. Certain teams are also given competitive balance picks in the amateur draft based on winning percentage, market score, and revenue, and the Cardinals are often beneficiaries of this rule.
If baseball is meant to be a true test of skill, it doesn’t need catch-up mechanics. Catch-up mechanics exist in board games because board games are, above all, social experiences. They’re reasons to spend time with other people, and though winning shouldn’t matter, it doesn’t feel good to get trounced. Baseball might be the most random of the major North American sports, but it’s still a skill-based game where people invest (both financially and emotionally) in the outcome. It’s also a fair game. Each team has an equal number of outs, and there’s no power growth in the way there is in Monopoly or Quacks. Scoring runs early doesn’t make it easier to score more runs later. If a team gets blown out, it’s their own fault.
If baseball is meant to be an entertainment product, giving the trailing team a little help could help keep things interesting. This wouldn’t be fair, but what’s fair isn’t always what’s fun. The single-game Wild Card “round” isn’t fair, but it’s tremendous theater. The rest of the playoffs aren’t fair, they’re a crapshoot. If MLB really wanted to be fair, the championship would be decided by a 145-game round robin where each team played every other team five times, and the team with the best record would be crowned the champions. That would be the fairest way, but it would also be the most boring.
MLB’s most recent proposal to expand the playoffs would make for a worse contest if the goal is to crown the best team, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to get eyeballs on the screen. One way to do that, is to artificially insert drama.
The remaining eight innings of Game 5 might have been interesting if the Braves got to start every inning with the bases loaded at least until they drew within five runs or so. That wouldn’t have been fair to the Cardinals, but St. Louis’s starter that day, Jack Flaherty, was the product of another catch-up mechanic: draft pick compensation for a player rejecting the qualifying offer.
Umpires are already biased toward the underdog when calling balls and strikes—umpires are more likely to call a ball on 0-2 and a strike on 3-0—why not make it impossible for a team to strike out looking with a four-run deficit or walk with a four-run lead?
These in-game alterations wouldn’t make baseball better. I hope it’s clear these aren’t serious suggestions. They would, however, keep the games close and thus more watchable. That’s ultimately the goal of revenue sharing, competitive balance picks, and the luxury tax threshold, and we don’t mind those catch-up mechanics. We’re all for leveling the playing field, so long as it happens off camera.
Kenny Kelly is the managing editor of Beyond the Box Score. You can follow him on Twitter @KennyKellyWords.